In honor of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame’s 20th anniversary, we invited the public to submit their favorite Creators and Creations. After tallying up your nominations (nearly 2,000 submissions!), a committee of industry experts narrowed down the list to the final twenty nominees.

Details about World’s Best Science Fiction Small Press and Pulp Magazine Collection High Grade

20,000+ Books Complete Sets Arkham House Fantasy Press

You are bidding on the most extensive, highest graded, complete set of all Small Press Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror books as well as the most extensive very rare pulp magazine collection in the world. Many of the sets below are the best in the world. A few are the only ones in the world, let alone in “like new” condition. Many are also complete (or near complete as some authors were dead at time of publication) signed sets.

You aren’t just buying a bunch of books, you are buying the rarest, and you are buying the best.

There is also a long Q&A section.

How can these things be in such high grade? Are there any fake dustjackets or facsimile reprint books?

EVERYTHING IS ORIGINAL. They are in such high grade because that’s what I go after. I have bought most of the books in the small press collection (for example) 2-4 times a piece. I love to marry high grade dustjackets to high grade books. I regularly buy the highest graded copy of any book that comes up for sale online from any of a couple dozen different book sites) as well as buy from older collectors with long time private collections. My record for any individual book is having bought it 13 times before finding a very high grade copy. Virtually none of these books came from collections I bought as a dealer. I had to buy them all individually. Most of the books I bought individually several times a piece. I’ve assembled all but one of these sets personally….

How large is the collection and book store?

Imagine a three car garage completely full from floor to ceiling, front to back without walking room in between, completely full of books. It’s the equivalent of about 350 to 400 “comic long boxes”, and will take the majority of an 18-wheeler for transportation purposes….

Why sell the personal collection and store together?

There is a lot of cross over interest, and frankly if I own even one book after this auction is over, I’ll just end up buying more….

1. Your bio says that “S.B. Divya is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma.” I am here to tell you that the Oxford comma has, unfortunately, been put on trial for its life. However, you are its defense attorney! Make your case.

Your honor, I humbly present the Oxford comma, also known as a serial comma. It is abastion of orderliness in a sea of grammatical chaos. This comma is an exemplary citizen, always obeying a simple rule: that it follows each item in a list until the last. Let us not create an exception to the rule! Let us not say, “It follows each item in a list except for the second to last and the last, which shall be joined by a conjunction.” Nay, let us stand fast against such unwieldy rule-making – such convoluted thinking – and embrace the simplicity that is embodied by this innocuous punctuation mark.

They currently reside at http://fanac.org/fanzines/Karass/” Go there for a blast from the past (1974-1978). Lots of good artwork too, especially in the final Last Karass issue. If you don’t remember it, Karass was a SF fan newszine I published. My thanks go to Joe and Mark for doing this.

Basically, Karass passed the torch to File 770 at the end of its run. Wasn’t that awhile ago!

The nomination of Hao’s work comes after Chinese author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem – depicting an alien civilisation’s invasion of earth during the Cultural Revolution – won best novel at the Hugo Awards last year.

Folding Beijing is set in the future, where Beijing folds up so different groups occupy different levels. The protagonist, a waste worker from the Third Space, is hired by a student in the Second Space to send a love letter to a girl in the First Space, despite strong opposition from the girl’s family due to their class difference.

(6) FAN MAIL. Kurt Busiek tweeted a fan letter he once sent to a Marvel comic calling on them to revive the quality of their letter section.

(7) BOOKMARKED. Rachel Swirsky interprets her story “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” in a comment at File 770.

“If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love has the clear implication that the author desires violent justice towards people who beat the narrator’s lover into a coma over either their sexuality or their ethnicity.”

OK, author talking about their own story follows. Feel free to skip.

Desires it, sure, but then is like “wow, that would suck and leave victims like me which is not okay.” Or: “I have a base desire to hurt you despite my understanding that it is morally and ethically wrong and would have terrible consequences, and I can’t even really fantasize about it without being overwhelmed by that knowledge and returned to the reality of the real world where nothing helps, nothing changes things, and certainly not revenge.”

(To a certain extent, isn’t that the *same* point Wright makes about homosexuals and tire irons? It’s his impulse, he says, but he’s not doing it, so presumably he’s aware that it is wrong–I hope–or at least that it has social consequences he doesn’t wish to encounter.)

I’m not suggesting you didn’t understand this in your comment. Just that it is a thing that confuses and bugs me about the revenge reading that’s been put forward, since it’s specifically an *anti-revenge* story.

It is an *anti-revenge* story because one of my intimate relations had recently uncovered a history of childhood physical and sexual abuse, and fuck if I didn’t fantasize about stopping or revenging it. But the damage is done. It is incontrovertible. And there is no revenge to be had; the abuser is still around, but what’s the point? It’s been thirty years. The person who did it, and the moment when it could have changed, are gone. All that’s left is the reality of the abuse and its long-lasting damage.

Not that I realized that was the impetus when I was writing it. I didn’t put it together until a lot later, that the story, and the angst I was going through over that, were related.

(I continue to have no problem with people who dislike it based on actual literary criteria, personal definitions of SF, or for sentimentality or manipulation. I would ask the folks in category two to consider noting that “it’s sff” or “it’s not sff” is actually a matter of opinion, not fact, since there is no reifiable SFF; it’s not like it’s a platonic thing that can be identified and pointed to. It’s a mobile boundary, interacting with a lot of other things. In this case, the interaction occurs around conditional tense and storytelling, which has a long history of being considered SFF in cases like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and folklore, but I suspect there are also works that are considered realist that use the device. I don’t actually have an investment in whether it’s SFF or not, as I cannot be moved to give a damn about genres, but I think both positions are valid.)

OK, done, thanks, needed a rant.

(8) GET YOUR SECRET DECODER RINGS READY. The signal is on its way from John Scalzi —

Want to erect a huge, neon sign that says "I'm an enormous asshole" over your head? Just use the phrase "virtue signalling" as a criticism!

Comment navigation

2) I am a recovering collector, am dealing with recovering by reading my books, and trying to not purchase more.

I might point out if you are buying a collection as compleat as this one says it is, you have nothing to collect. And as large as it is said to be, you would spend much time trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for. And if you read anything its value goes down.

If the eM-drive effect is real, it is strange that everyone is focused on how this would be a cool space drive. Violation of conservation of momentum, using nothing more than a conical can and a microwave!

I don’t think it would be hard to make this into a perpetual motion machine, and then into an energy generator using no fuel, use the free power to create matter, and the whole shebang could be no bigger than a microwave oven! You’d simply input a little energy using a hand crank on the side, and the eM-drive would magnify the energy and synthesise anything you wanted, let’s say salt as a simple test, just two simple elements.

If anyone wants to use My Idea (TM) in a story, my price is one flitch of bacon.

@Niall McAuley: If the eM-drive effect is real, it is strange that everyone is focused on how this would be a cool space drive. Violation of conservation of momentum, using nothing more than a conical can and a microwave!

Yeah, which is why I give it all the side-eye. Any explanation of the EmDrive will have to balance the energetic books. Mind you, you can get what looks like conservation-busting setups like the Casimir effect which, when properly explained, aren’t. The EmDrive could be real and caused by something similar that looks non-conserving but really is, maaaaaaybe, but I’m super doubtful.

But everyone’s focused on it being a space drive instead of a perpetual motion machine because that’s how it’s been presented, and its supporters understandably don’t want to go too deep into the fevered swamplands of perpetual-motion schemes.

Thanks for the link! I actually found the article deeply (bitterly) amusing because all his examples are of leftist “virtue-signalling”, while — in the US at least — rightist virtue-signalling is a whole *industry*. For instance, Jesus Fish stickers on cars or businesses. Or the fact that habitual molester Dennis Hastert said that repeat child molesters should get life sentences. But that maybe rises to the level of “hypocrisy”.

Niall McAuley on April 28, 2016 at 6:58 am said:
If the eM-drive effect is real, it is strange that everyone is focused on how this would be a cool space drive. Violation of conservation of momentum, using nothing more than a conical can and a microwave!

Okay, I’ll think about how this would be a scary space drive that could slowly build space junk up to relativistic speeds and then slam it into planets using nothing more than a conical can and a microwave, simple things any millionaire can afford to launch into orbit.

Not to belabour the obvious, but that’s because “virtue signalling” is just a fancy way to imply insincerity without actually having to come out and say it. And since he’s the kind of conservative who thinks his awful views are what we all, really, accept as common sense, he has to invoke insincerity to explain why so many people keep saying things he disapproves of.

(ObBooks: I’ve been doing a lot of comfort-reading lately, which mostly means re-reading my favourite Cherryh novels – Pride of Chanur, Hellburner, and Fortress in the Eye of Time so far… not that they’re my only favourites.)

I doubt that the EMP [Experience Music Project] Museum’s hall of fame is very prestigious just yet, since the museum was founded in 2000 (and that explains why such very obvious choices are not in its hall of fame yet). But wait and see. And there’s nothing wrong with having another occasion to celebrate popular favorites.

Matthew Johnson — I’m with you. The earlier example of how to rewrite a sentence to make it unambiguous without the Oxford comma puzzles me: yeah, you can rewrite — or you can put a comma in.

It’s not like there’s a worldwide shortage of commas, or something so obscene about a comma that you need to do extra work to reduce the number of commas seen in daily life. Just tap the key, man, and move on to the next sentence.

Re: violation of conservation. In Tim Powers’s quite good fantasy story “Pat Moore”, someone sets up a machine that is supposed to replicate the effect of Maxwell’s Demon using an air conditioner and other equipment to separate fast- and slow-moving air molecules. Supposedly this really does violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and thus has supernatural effects. It is nowhere acknowledged in the story that there is no violation of the 2nd law if you count the machine as part of the system. Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment because its “demon” is a hypothetical immaterial agent that uses no energy. You might say that Powers’s machine is good enough for fantasy, but I didn’t think so: it’s odd that the least believable thing in a story involving ghosts would be a physical machine that is claimed to work in a way that it actually wouldn’t.

And as large as it is said to be, you would spend much time trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for. And if you read anything its value goes down.

I have a sizable pile (but not as sizable as that pile) of old Analog, Galaxy, If, Asimov’s, SF&F, and various others bought from various places I happened across them and dating back as early as the 1950s. I’ve had many of them for at least 20 years, have never gotten around to reading them, and probably never will. I suspect this guy’s collection is much the same.

Okay, I’ll think about how this would be a scary space drive that could slowly build space junk up to relativistic speeds and then slam it into planets using nothing more than a conical can and a microwave, simple things any millionaire can afford to launch into orbit.

A conical can, a microwave, and a simple off-the shelf multi-megawatt portable fusion power plant to provide the massive amount of electricity needed…

It’s making me think of Eric Laithwaite and his anti-gravity gyroscopes.

Okay, this reminds me again of something I was reminded of by the mention of perpetual motion machines. I vaguely remembered a story about a SF writer supporting a real-life perpetual motion invention, then after some googling remembered it was an anti-gravity invention. So your mention here made me go googling again, and it wasn’t an anti-gravity invention either, it was another reactionless drive–the Dean Drive, supported by John W. Campbell (and Jerry Pournelle.)

(6) FAN MAIL. – Having just watched Captain America: Civil War*, I’m finding the opening line of Kurt’s letter to be crazy apropos, as Avengers is certainly the figurehead of Marvel Comics now, both within and without the comic books.

* No Spoilers – Screw Team Cap and Team Iron Man, I wanna be in Team Black Panther! The movie is excellent, and incredibly well paced – didn’t feel overcrowded or draggy at all. 2 post-credit scenes.

I think part of why the eM-drive is being talked about in the context of space exploration is that even if it works exactly as advertised, there isn’t much oomph there. One of these big enough to move a car at all would be larger than the car.

Space travel is one of the few areas where a small amount of force is useful over a long enough span of time.

On the one hand, almost any kind of collective action aimed at correcting some social problem needs a way of directing the troupe’s attention (right back to the monkey who screeches “Leopard!” in monkey-talk). On the other hand, Jon F. Zeigler’s on-the-money phrase “a certain style of highly performative public behavior” knocked loose my memory of the parable of the publican and the Pharisee, which is one reason I resist bumper-stickers, lapel pins, and such. (Though I will leave my red “I Voted” sticker on my jacket on election day.)

And I don’t know whether the third hand is the gripping one, but I do wonder what would become of collective action were we to eliminate the ego-gratification component of doing and being seen to do good works. (Is there a fourth hand containing the capacity for mob action?)

I peeked at a few of these and it provoked an enormous nostalgia rush, as Karass‘s run overlapped my most active years of neofandom and fanzine publishing. So many familiar names and fanzines…

Linda holds a special place in my heart. She was possibly the most helpful fan to me when I was a neofan. And, most importantly, she introduced me to Leslie Smith, who I would eventually marry, at the 1983 Worldcon in Baltimore.

I will be echoing what other people have said here recently when I report that Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway is simply beautiful.

The premise is a boarding school for teenagers who have gone to other worlds, fantasy worlds, and then returned, and are left longing to go back to the place they now feel is home. They need a school (run by someone who had the same experience) because people in the mundane world don’t believe them and can only try to force them to fit the surroundings where they don’t belong. Naturally the overriding mood of the story is wistfulness, and it’s perfectly captured.

The main characters are tremendously appealing (yes, even the amoral mad scientist); they are a group of clever misfits who support each other fiercely, although recognizing that they can’t provide a true home for each other — Nancy reflects that “this was the place where she came closest to belonging in the world.” The idea proposed about the otherworlds is that they are attracted by “sympathy” to people who are already out of place in their lives (to be sure it doesn’t always work out perfectly — not all world-travelers found themselves in a place where they would happily stay forever). That’s the reason that the vast majority of the students are girls, since they’re much more likely than boys to be disregarded and expected to squeeze themselves into a corner of the world rather than having the world shape itself to their wishes.

The main character is Nancy, who traveled to the Halls of the Dead, a place of ghosts that resembled the painter John William Waterhouse’s shadowy groves. (So many of the fantasy worlds described seem (at least in aesthetics) like ones we’ve heard of previously, that I wonder if the author means to imply that this world’s artists are depicting actual otherworlds.) Not only is Nancy asexual, making her need to conceal from her fellow high-schoolers that she doesn’t, like them, find mating games to be the most important thing in the world, but there is just a fundamental mismatch in the, you might say, energy of how she exists compared to everyone else, and the stillness of ghosts is perfect for her.

There’s also Sumi, a charmingly, chaotically energetic girl who escaped a very rigid and prim family to a nonsense world. And there’s Jack, a twin who says “Our parents were… the sort who always wanted to put things in boxes…. Ever watch a pair of perfectionists try to decide which of their identical children is the ‘smart one’ versus the ‘pretty one’? It would have been funny, if our lives hadn’t been the prize they were trying to win.” Jack went with her sister to a world of horror where she became apprenticed to a mad scientist, where the question was not what ought to be but only what could be, namely anything. And a number of other equally vivid characters.

It’s a short novella, and it’s just the perfect length. I don’t think anything needed to be added to flesh out its themes and characters; it says what it had to say and ends on the right note.

@Lorcan
yes, that came to my mind too, partly because a former co-worker went to work for them. There was a lot of talk about their magic phone charger a few months ago (“we don’t know how it works – but it does!”) but they’ve gone quiet again

Reading: I just finished Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton. It was interesting — kind of weird fantasy in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith or Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, but NC-17 and very much not for the squeamish.

And I just started Neuromancer for the first time in probably a quarter century, for no articulable reason.

I doubt that the EMP [Experience Music Project] Museum’s hall of fame is very prestigious just yet, since the museum was founded in 2000 (and that explains why such very obvious choices are not in its hall of fame yet).

In 2005, the SF Museum co-housed with the EMP (but which functioned as a separate entity at the time) took over the Hall of Fame, narrowed it to exclude fantasy for future inductees, and expanded it to take in non-prose creators.

I prefer sentence re-arrangement to adding commas to remove ambiguity. A comma is easily overlooked (one reason we* all have problems with them is that we don’t notice them when we aren’t paying attention to them). A I understand it, once upon a time a comma was used willy-nilly to indicate whenever the writer felt a tiny pause was a good idea.

IMHO sentences such as ‘The cat ate my parents, Mahatma Ghandi and the Shah of Iran’ are better re-written as ‘The cat ate Mahatma Ghandi, the Shah of Iran and my parents.’

*[‘we’ here does not include those people with mutant copy-editing powers]

I have to say when I post a list of authors I don’t buy & why it’s usually because a few people asked and I got tired of saying no. If that’s virtue signally you say tomato I say tomatoh. I get really tired of being told when I share information it’s automatically to show off or impress others because people can only think in one or two ways.

Now I might end up do a blog post on it and you’d have no way to know 5, 10, 20 people on various FB/twitter/email/blog community had asked for my list because you found my blog through some other route and starting a blog post with Here you go all my so noisy friends looks a bit too much like They support me in email and I’m not un-savvy when it comes to the web.

I trust my readers to figure there were a number of discussions happening on the net and I decided to write a Think about this post. Newbies to my blog will of course not have a history with me.

Starting out judging others favorably can be an amazing experience. People share information for all sorts of reasons but most of the people I know who really do buy stuff in a keeping up with the Joneses manner don’t talk to impress. They talk because that is the stuff their lives are made up of.

Social media, bumper stickers, buttons don’t mean someone isn’t taking actions also. I can care about the Hugos and US politics at the same time. Why can’t I like to share what I do & love on buttons & be actively working towards it at the same time? Virtue signaling is just another way for one group to try to judge another based on little data.

someone sets up a machine that is supposed to replicate the effect of Maxwell’s Demon using an air conditioner and other equipment to separate fast- and slow-moving air molecules.

The thing is that there actually is such a device: the Vortex tube. It’s been built, and it’s pretty well understood. For the most part it’s a neat toy, but rarely efficient enough to be useful unless you already have a ready supply of compressed air.

As you note, once you include all the relevant parts in the ‘system’, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not violated. In the case of a Vortex tube, while the tube itself has no moving parts, the air has to be compressed and fed in at enough speed to set up the vortex inside the tube, and the extra energy required to do that gets converted into heat that stays in the air exiting the tube.

Great review of Every Heart a Doorway. I believe she is hoping to write more in the setting, presumably looking into different worlds and characters with the school as a framing device.

I found it interesting that there was some overlap in concept with Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass from January Lightspeed, although the execution was from different angles. Each story must have been written without being aware of the other. What I liked about the earlier story was that the concept seemed so clever and natural that i was surprised I’d never seen it treated quite that way before, and then another version comes along!

JoeH: You never need an excuse to crack open Neuromancer. It’s one of the books that if I’ve had a lousy day, I take with me to the pub to reread.

I not only really enjoyed “Folding Beijing” but also nominated it. I found her perspective on the very old trope of physical environment representing social/culture hierarchies unlike most I’d read, and was quite drawn into the story. The quality of the writing (and or translation) wasn’t as strong as others, but I found myself really drawn to the structure and flow of the story. It will go above No Award for me.

Anything I put on the nomination ballot or was on my longlist or I believe got on the ballot without the RPs I’m treating as legitimate this year. I’m being much more liberal than last year. I won’t be leaving nearly as much off my ballot simply because it was on a slate this year. That said I’ll be using NA quite a bit and nothing from Castilia House will be ranked at all – it will be left off my ballot.

I’d love to see Castilia House works get as few votes as possible first pass – something under 300 would be nice. If only the RP rank the Castilia House works we might make more of a point to his followers about how much time & money they are wasting. Yes I’m feeling vindictive this 3rd/4th year of VDs shenanigans.